4/23/13 EASI Webinar Transcript

  Okay, everyone. I want to thank you for being here for this webinar. It is the first of a series about forms and other kind of interactive features in PDF, word, and on the web. And I just want to remind you probably what most of you already know and that is that EASI has a number of webinars and courses. We've got a number of free webinars. Thank you for those of you who come to those. We have some fee-based webinars and either have a series, or if you have a membership, so we have a membership program, and if you buy the annual membership you can go to all of the fee-based webinars for free and get a 20% discount on all of them courses, so you didn't come for the amount, but I want to make sure you remember who we are and I will turn it over to Karen.

  Great, thanks, Norm. And today we are going to talk about, I did not realize I was first so we're going to talk off start with the first fun topic of PDF and accessible forms. I do have Acrobat 11 and I found out that lifecycle designer is now sold separately. So I'm going to just turn off the mic for a moment so, actually, I might be able to, no, I'm going to turn off the mic for a moment so I can send you as part of the webinar link to the Adobe webpage where you can get lifecycle designer. If you upgrade from a previous version of Acrobat there is a link that you can get a free upgrade to lifecycle designer, so you're looking at Adobe Acrobat Pro and if you are working with XFA forms that you will want to work with lifecycle designer and I will explain the difference. In the past until Acrobat 11, you get both tools. You can create forms in either Acrobat, or you can create forms and lifecycle designer. But, with Acrobat 11 or excite, lifecycle designer is now sold separately. So here is the link if you want it and again I'm going to make sure it's part of the webinar to go to the Adobe website and take a look at how you can get the upgrade to lifecycle designer. All right, I'm back, there is the link. There it is.

Hang on a moment, my okay, PDF forms, there are two ways that you can create PDF forms. You can create them in Acrobat and when you create them in Acrobat it's actually a two-step process. You had the form fields and form controls I will refer to them as form controls. You add the form controls to an untagged PDF document and once you have all the form controls and affirmative air radio buttons or checkboxes or list boxes or even text boxes where you can write some text you exit the form tool and then you tag the document and repair it. That is one way to make PDF forms. I know that there is a rumor, people do say they can now add form controls in Microsoft Word and when they convert the document to attack PDF the form controls come through. I don't recommend that. I recommend that if you are creating a PDF form you create the form controls in Acrobat. There is some language difference and some syntax difference as you know if you have been working with PDF documents from Word and you want to make sure that any repair time is as little as possible. So, start with an untagged PDF document from Word. You can use Word to create your template. Add the form controls in Adobe Acrobat.

The other way of creating forms is to create demand lifecycle designer. If you are going to lose, use lifecycle designer I recommend you create the form from stretch. To import a PDF document or word document to use as the background because often what happens is because it is background it is seen as an artifact. So instructions will not be read by the adaptive technology. The form controls might be but if you have specific instructions or if the language on your form controls is not clear someone with a screen reader may not have access to the valuable information. Okay. Hang on a minute. I seem to be jumping all over the place, here.

This is a brand-new interface for this, Norm, and it's a little confusing. Okay, XFA forms are not PDF forms. When you create a form in lifecycle designer even though you can save it as a PDF document it's only using Acrobat or reader as a viewer for the XFA form and XFA is something like expandable fillable, I forget what the A stands for. You notice if you've done any work with lifecycle designer and have access some of the tools on the Internet for creating forms using lifecycle designer that you can create what are called expandable form controls. Especially for text.

For example if you have a project proposal and you want to create an accessible form or a form and you want someone to be able to write 2000 words, or 2000 characters, actually words, then you can create what is called an expandable form. As someone types up to the 2000 words, initially, the size of the text edit area does not increase, but what happens when you press tab to move to the next form control is that all of a sudden you have an expanded, all of the text you type in is now visible, even addressed if the page numbers, or pages in your form to accommodate the text and it is one way that if you are doing proposals you can see the entire piece of text at one time instead of having to export it out of the form and that is called the dynamic form.

Again I have heard rumors that the dynamic forms, they come from Adobe to be fair, these dynamic forms are accessible. I have worked on a couple of them in terms of trying to make them as accessible as possible and also trying to fill them out. And I do not find them very accessible and I recommend that if you're using XFA forms are lifecycle designers that you avoid using the expandable text edit boxes or areas until we can get some better accessibility to them. The problem is once the form control expands if I go back and try to edit it does not contract again easily or it confuses my screen reader and I end up in a totally different place. I can't accurately tell where I am in the 2000 words and it's a function of the expandability of the text control. So, and the other problem with XFA forms is that you are creating them in lifecycle designer even though you are viewing them in Acrobat, you cannot use the accessibility full check to validate the tags in and XFA form, form created in lifecycle designer. There are two separate applications. You can validate a form that you created in Adobe Acrobat in Adobe Acrobat, but if you've created something in lifecycle designer, then there are no accessibility checkers for those types of forms you really have to know your tags, you have to know your error messages. All of those things. In lifecycle designer by default, you put a language on a tag or there is no language to the document, there is no way to assign a language. But there is a language because it was done in lifecycle designer. So it's those kinds of things. You may find that the tab order is out but if you go back to lifecycle designer and view the tab order the tab order is correct. It's using a screen reader you may get with JAWS for example the list of form controls might be correct but when you tab around the document may be out of order you may be able to tab around the XFA form in the correct order but when you get a list losing the screen reader the form controls are all jumbled. Just be aware that if you are creating XFA forms using lifecycle designer you really have to know what you are doing and you really have to be familiar with accessible PDF documents.

I did have, my computer is taking a while to load. I thought it was the first slide, a slide that talked about the hierarchy of tasks when it comes to working with PDF documents and apparently on my screen anyway, this looks like a blank slide, so let me go back and let me go forward again and see if I can drop into reality. Text and image for slides I'm going to turn off some I can reload my page and see if that is going to help us.

  Debbie says it is her next slide.

  My screen is blank. I have absolutely nothing here. Okay, let me try and do some troubleshooting here because I don't have anything on my screen. All right, everyone I have absolutely nothing on my screen so I cannot tell what side I'm on, or where I am. Norm, when this presentation goes out, can you please put the slide deck up separate from the audio track and let people know that they will have to piece it together? They will have to listen to the audio and view the slides. Thank you. All right, so in PDF documents there is a hierarchy of tasks. And when you open the PDF document it doesn't matter what you are going to do with it, oh, I found it. All right. Now I have things flying on the screen. Okay, let me go back. I apologize for this but it is technology. And it is gone again. All right, here we go, hierarchy of tasks. There is a hierarchy of tasks when you read a PDF document. The first thing you do is ask yourself this is a scanned document. If it is a scanned document and you use the OCR tool in Adobe Acrobat to perform text recognition because if you do not do that, then no one with a screen reader is going to be able to read the PDF document and I'm talking about and tagged PDF document, so when you open it is a scanned document, if yes you see OCR or text recognition tool. The second question you ask yourself is does this have form controls? Is this supposed to be a fillable form? And if you are looking at fillable forms if you are creating an information brochure that's talking about a form you don't necessarily have to make the samples of form controls fillable in the document, but you do have to explain why people would find if they did then go ahead and, go ahead and fill the form. If the document has form controls, then you at the form controls to the document and you would do that in Adobe Acrobat. The next question you ask yourself is are there links in the document and if there are links in the document, links to e-mail, other websites, instructions, anything, then you create the links from URLs and that is a tool to the right-hand side of the document for. It is either pages or content, and you will see, no, yeah, you will see an item called create URLs, create links from URLs. You do that next.

The next step, if you are going to be adding multimedia, video to your PDF, which I do not recommend at this time, but since I worked through it I will add this to my hierarchy of tasks, that has to be added next. Note that if you are adding multimedia to your PDF document, it's not going to be accessible using screen readers. Most screen readers will not be able to find the multimedia and even if they could find it it would be identified as rich media and they will not have access to the controls to play it and stopped it. So, nice idea, not quite as accessible as we would like it at this time. So once you've gone through all of those things, then you tagged the document, so the form controls have to go into the document first you create the links from URLs. You're not going to see any of these things in the tags tree until you do tag the document and one of the things that people forget when they are working with forms is they will put the form controls and, they will make the form controls as accessible as possible you can have the best radio buttons in the entire universe in the PDF document, if you forget to tag the document the form is not accessible so you really need to pay attention to the hierarchy of tasks and create a process.

Adobe has documented this hierarchy of tasks since Acrobat 5.1. And it is in most of their documentation. Sometimes we either do not see it or cannot find it. Let me see if I can go to the next all right, so here is a sample of how you can create a form control, or form document using Microsoft Word. And again, one of the things that people do not do with forms is actually designed the form before they created. They don't think about the information that they want people to fill in, they don't think about how people are logically going to follow-through the form and fill out information. And because of this you end up with some forms where they want your first name, address, last name, city, postal code that you're going to want you to answer questions and know what country you are in and you jump all over the place. It is because they have not paid attention to a logical recorder. The image on the slide to the left is a word document wife actually use underline and cute symbols to say where I want things in the document. I find that not helpful. One of the big problems with this is going to be matching up your form controls with those lines. It becomes especially difficult if you put checkboxes, if you use a symbol to indicate where you want to put a checkbox I have not found even with high magnification a way to accurately lay over the form control on top of that checkbox so you don't get a double or duplicate image. So my suggestion is to do what is on the right and you notice the heading, what is on this image has a line through it and that is one of the peculiarities of Word 2010 and Acrobat 10. Sometimes if I use a border underneath it it comes through in a PDF document and in this case I did not fix it in the word document, so if you see that you just need to go back to the word document or you can repair it in Acrobat but it's one of those things that sometimes happens in Word documents.

You notice however in this form when I laid it out I haven't put the lines in, so that gives me the freedom to place the form controls where I need to so they won't be close together I do not have to match up blinds. I can use the table to indicate where you want radio buttons, but I'm not confined in my PDF form to place a form controls where I may have thought they went when I was doing the word document. So again, something to keep in mind when you are designing the form and hopefully you all will be designing your forms instead of going blah on paper. So how do we create a PDF form, the first thing you need is a untagged document. This is the one and only time you can use Microsoft Word and use the print command and print to Adobe PDF because you don't want a tag document. If someone has thoughtfully created a template and has tacked it, simply delete the tags tree because you need an untagged document. If you're using any type of adaptive technology such as text to speech or screen reading note that forms is a highly driven activity and I don't know any screen reader that would allow you either using lifecycle designer or Adobe Acrobat to create a form. You can test them, you can help with the design but in terms of being able to add the form controls and create the form independently using a screen reader, no. You have to be able to use a mouse or a trackball. You have to be able to see on the screen where you are placing the form controls.

You start with an untagged document and in Acrobat 10 or 11 you go up to review, or tools and you choose the form toolbar and that is the picture I have here on the slide. So the form toolbar as an edit and a list you are in edit mode this is the mode you will see it simply tells you some of things you can do with the form, but the starting point is to click edit you can narrow down and press the keyboard, but again, once you get into editing and creating forms you are not going to be able to do this without a mouse.

One of the first things that's going to happen if you are using Acrobat 10 is you are going to get a message saying that it's going to auto detect the forms. In Acrobat 10 point lifecycle designer was included, there are two, I think you have to create lifecycle designer forms simply by launching lifecycle designer. In Acrobat eight and nine it was kind of thing combined thing and you had to be very careful not to launch lifecycle designer when you were creating a form. The ability to auto detect form controls is mostly for text fields. I know that some people have told me that it will work with radio buttons and text boxes I have not found that to be true it certainly will not work with lists. What happens is it goes through the document and uses the underline it uses those cues to say this should be a text field it's another reason not to put those in your template because it will make everything individual text fields and one of the problems with creating radio buttons for a table template is that it will identify each of the table cells that has nothing in it, or sometimes it will identify table cells with nothing in it as possible text fields or controls and then you have to go through and delete all of those. So starting with a blanket with no underline forms is the best thing to do, so once I went to the auto detect the image on the slide shows exactly what came up in Adobe Acrobat for form controls. So you can see it did cope into the table and identify some of the empty cells as text when it came down to the comments section at the bottom of the form where I had individual lines in case someone was printing this out in writing, and now created each one of those lines as an individual text control. You do not want this.

If you are asking people to write a comment or an abstract or any amount of text, you do not want the individual lines to be individual tax controls. Why not? The problem is when I tab into the first one I only have so many characters. Then I have to suspend my thought and the tab to the next one remember what word I was on and attempt to the end of that, remember where it was, suspend my thought, tab to the third line and continue writing so for anyone who has cognitive learning or even visual disabilities people using screen readers, being able to be asked for comments and grade 2 or three words, remember where you are, tab to the next one, continue on, sometimes you don't know where you have reached the end of the better idea is to have that all one continuous multiline text box. And we will do that, I will show you that as we move through the webinar.

What I had to do with the form is actually go through and take out all of the text boxes except one. I could use one and usually I use the first one for the comments section and then I make it bigger and multiline. So here is my sample for checkboxes and I have question number one and question number one says choose as many of the items below that apply. And I have the grass is green, the sky is blue, the daisies are white with yellow centers and black-eyed Susan's are yellow with black centers. Going to allow people multiple-choice. I could do this as a list as well because in your drop-down list you can allow people to choose multiple items. I find that checkboxes because people can go through and read them and press the it is a lot easier to navigate if you are using a screen reader or adaptive technology. Then trying to select noncontiguous items in a list. So here is what I started with. This was my Word document. I then went to print and chose Adobe PDF as my printer. So I have an untagged PDF document that then open it in Microsoft Word. I did have my screen reader running and my computer does have adaptive technology I don't have reader on my machine, I should tell you that, I should tell you that, but the results will be the same. It's just that because I work most of the time in Acrobat it's easier for me to read the same Acrobat. So with the untagged PDF document open by getting message that says this is an untagged PDF document you need to refer to the reading order if you're using adaptive technology and working with tabs you want to dismiss that. You don't want Acrobat to create those virtual tags. I find that it interferes with your ability to create real tags and I have found that since Acrobat eight or nine. Since I get the message I press the escape key and JAWS will tell me I have a blank document. There are also some things I cannot do with my screen reader running because the screen reader is in virtual view of the document and moving back and forth from the tags treat the document creates some issues for it. There are some tax that will not let me compare and those kinds of problems it depends on what you are doing whether you can leave your adaptive technology running or not. The first two and

The first two images on this slide do not belong there I do not know why I left them there, I apologize. So in form twice actually clicked on edit and what has happened is that I've been told I have to save my document to add form controls and I've been told there are no form controls in the document you want me to go ahead and figure them out and then I said yes and I get the message because I have no lines, there are no form controls in the document, so for me that is fine because I want to work I've worked with PDF forms since Acrobat so some of the things I'm telling you a race that I've streamlined the process because I don't have hours and hours to spend on a form. Once I get through auto detect in the auto detect tells me there are no form controls then I go back to the form tool on the right of my document and the very first item is to add a form field. If I click on that I don't see any of the form controls I can add until I click on that and I have the drop-down list that comes over and is called a rollup or something comes over the rest of the content of the toolbar and I have access to different types of form controls I can add to my PDF document, things like radio buttons and a digital signature field, all those kinds of things. The second kind of text box if you are in any doubt they have little pictures to them to the left of the text and the second text box when I move my mouse over the document I have crosshairs. So I can position the text box exactly where I need to position it. I started the upper left corner and drag to the lower right or I can simply click the button because it has a default size and when it happens the image that appears on the slide in the upper right is what you will see. You will see a blue form control that is the text that you put in the document and you will have kind of a yellow dialogue. Again this is not accessible unless you are using a mouse input focus in it the first thing that is already filled in for you is the type of field, or that type of control in this case it is text box in this case it's already given a number, text box 1. One of the things I do especially working on a longform because I have a list of the form control Syed to the form in Adobe Acrobat in forms mode I give the name something that is meaningful to me so in this case the check box will be called question one. I can indicate whether it is a required field. If it is a required field I also need in the tool tip to indicate that it is a required field. I can also indicate the field, in this case the grasses in the tooltip I will put the grass is green, – required so that I can place no doubt that this is a required field.

In the yellow dialogue box there is a link that will open the full properties dialog. And that is where I do most of the work. In the center bottom of the slide is the general tab in this text box properties and you will see that the name is question one, the tooltip is what will be read by the adaptive technology in this case I simply put the text for question one choose the many, as many of the following supply.-Go to the options tab and I can look at the value for that checkbox whether it is checked by default, whether we want to force everyone to acknowledge that grass is green, or whether the state of the checkbox is off until the person checks it. So those are the two parts of your checkbox.

When I get a few check boxes created in my document I can look to the right in Adobe Acrobat and see a list of the check boxes in this case that I have. So you see the first image image I have in the slide I have page 1 of my form and the first form controls. So in terms of me taggingthe PDF form. I have found a way to keep everything organized. So if I do have to come in and make repairs. I can look in the list and know exactly what needs to be fixed or rearranged. By default, the tab order is not turned on but you can turn it on. The second larger image on the slide is the check boxes. And you notice they are all uniform except for the third one, which I did not get lined up. I can also adjust the size and position of the text boxes to make them appear smaller and nicer. I have not done this because I only have one hour. In the third image on the slide. I turned on the tab order. You notice I have in the upper left corner of the checkbox on the form. The first one is one, the second one is to the third one is three. The fourth one is for. That is the order in which someone who's using adaptive technology, some using the keyboard will come across the form controls the document and if they were out of order, I can simply go back to the view of the list where it says page 1 and my list of form controls and I can't drag them to wherever they need to be in the document and my tab order is automatically going to adjust to accommodate that. That is the fastest way I know to reposition or reorder the way that people are going to tab through a form.

So what does this look like to a screen reader? The image of this slide on the left is a list of form controls. I got using the JAWS Street reader so you notice that it reads the question because I put that in the tooltip and then it's going to tell me that it's a checkbox and it's going to tell me what the check boxes for. There is nothing worse than going through a form and hearing checkbox unchecked, checkbox unchecked, or radio button unchecked, or unlabeled edit, then we have absolutely no idea what it is we are supposed to do with those forms. The image on the right is from Acrobat 11. And instead of having an X in the checkbox, which has been what happens when you create a PDF form. In previous versions. Now when I press the I have a checkmark which looks a little nicer. So that is check boxes. The next thing that we're going to take a look at our radio buttons. Sorry, tab order and how to turn it on.

If you go to the form column on the right of the document down where you have page 1 and the list of form controls. There is a list of form controls. When you activate the button you get a list and you can show the tab order, then you're going to get a dialogue that says if you want to manually fix the tab order, here is what you do. And if I go down to the list attack or reflected if I go to the document itself and look at the form controls. Again I had those in the upper left corner of each control. So I am able to see the tab order and I'm able to affect it.

Radio buttons, you need to practice. There is no getting around it, you need practice. When you are working with radio buttons. A lot of people will not use radio buttons in PDF because they say they are not accessible. Any of the radio buttons that I have created have always been accessible. The only time a radio button that I created has not been successful is when I have not created the radio button properly and forgot how to group them and that was in Acrobat eight and nine. What I found in Acrobat 10 and 11 is because radio button seem to be problematic for those of us who are developing forms, it is a lot more intuitive and I don't have as many problems creating radio buttons if I haven't done them in a while one of the things you need to know about radio buttons is that all of the radio buttons have to have the same name. You notice if you put a radio button in your document. It will be called, there are two parts of the yellow dog dialogue so I go back to the form toolbar, I clicked at a form field and I chose radio buttons.

I come back to my form, get the crosshairs, and I get the radio buttons. Radio buttons around, but when you put them into the form or onto the form. They are square and they will appear square till you go back to the regular view of the form control, so do not panic when you see the squares. You have to state of the radio button, so for example, the state maybe, or the value may be, agree, disagree, strongly agree, neutral, and that is what goes on the first edit field of the yellow dialog that pops up. The second edit field is the name. So again I would call these if it were for question number two, I would call this group of radio buttons. Question two. When I had the radio buttons to the document. Unlike the check boxes where I had question one number zero question one number two, you will notice in the lower right-hand corner of this slide that the radio buttons are all nested underneath the name of the group. Again, when you go to the properties, the tooltip is usually a reminder of what the question is, and if you go to the options, the value is going to be the agree, the disagree, the neutral and that way, when I get a list of the radio buttons. For example, if I use the grass is green. I'm going to have a list that says the grass is green agree, the grass is green, neutral, the grass is green, disagree. I can quickly go and move to the radio button and press the spacebar to activate it.

With radio buttons. You can only have one checked. With checkboxes you can allow people to have multiple options check. I find as I said that checkboxes versus a drop-down list where you have multiple choices is a lot clearer for people who are using adaptive technology and even those that do not. When you are creating a drop-down list again, you're going to go over to the forms item in the right-hand side, the forms tool you are going to click on add a form field and you will choose drop-down list.

When you move to the document. It's going to create this large text area as shown in the image in the upper left corner of the site and really with a list. You don't want the entire list shown all you want is the entire item and be able to press up, down arrow or first character navigation to choose what they want. So with drop so you can only show the default option when you make the list. It's a good idea when people come to it when people want, they can simply move to the next form control and fill out the form. It actually saves them time, so again I might cause a drop-down question three and you can see from the center top image as soon as I let the mouse go after I've added this to the form I get the yellow dialog and I can give the drop-down listing name.

Drop-down lists are a little bit different in terms of options so I want to again go into the properties. I want to go to the general tab and I want to type in a tooltip, and again it's going to be part of the question or all of the question if it is short. If it's a long question don't put the entire thing just enough to jog someone's memory as to what it is they are trying to choose.-Go to the options tab and for each item in the drop-down list. I need to add it. In the first field of options dialogue for the drop-down list is going to be for the first item in the list, or for an item in the list. For example if you're working for a university and looking at what kinds of students are taking for deep courses you can say living within the GTA or greater Toronto area, living within 100 miles of the GTA, living in Ontario, living in Canada or international students. You can have all of those things in your drop-down list. If you want to know what type of student they are you can have full-time student, part-time student, continuing education student. You can even put online student you can get as granular as you want with your list.

So you type the first item for the list and you click or activate the add button, it will add it to the list. It appears that about the center of the properties dialog. You notice that in this property, the options tab for each one. You will also see the word value. If you choose a value 12345. If you choose to have the contents of the form exported as part of an Excel worksheet or e-mail then that is the value you are going to get. You're not going to get the value (inaudible), you get value one, so it becomes easier to chart and look at if you're going to export the data from your forms into a database or Excel spreadsheet. So that is what the value is four. The lower left corner, sorry, lower right corner of the dialog you can see the text and again you can adjust the font, you can adjust the appearance. I will talk about appearance in a bit. You can size set up so that you don't see any of the other items in the list and you keep people focused on the first or default item. And you can choose which of those is the first or default item. So if you accidentally put things in the wrong order. You can move them up or down or choose a default item. By default it's going to use the first item in the list.

So, text form controls, where you can write an abstract or in this case a comment. I'm going back to the first form that we took a look at where several lines were seen and interpreted by the autodetect tool has been separate form fields or form controls. So, I deleted the last, 123 and I expanded the first one, so if you look in the lower right corner you will see that I now have a large space that I can easily write without having to move to another form control to finish it and I can just continuously right. In the properties for those form controls and if you had it going to the form tools, and then coming back to the document and dragging you're going to get that yellow dialog. With this I use the form that has the autodetect in, so that's why you are not seen it here. I go into properties and if you have a form like this you go into form controls, properties is the first I demand it opens the first properties dialog that you can get to from yellow dialog.

I put my tooltip and then I go to options I can choose how many characters I can choose whether it's multiline. I can choose whether there's a scrollbar, I have some options that I can make this accessible. And usable for the form. One of the things, while I am here that I'll talk about is the appearance tab in the properties dialog. By default, the form controls are going to show up as kind of a blue so that you can see them in the form. Under the form preferences in Acrobat and reader. You also have the ability to identify required fields. So, if a field is required, it will show up with a different border around it. You can also choose if you can see the light you can choose to have the form controls identified in a different way. If, as the form designer you come into these properties, you go to the appearance tab and you choose a background color for the text boxes or a border color for any of your form controls. Because all of them have this appearance tab, then in effect you create a barrier to accessibility. Because you are forcing a person to view the form using your colors. It is the same as hard coding something on the Internet or direct coding, coloring or formatting something in Microsoft Word. You create a barrier to accessibility. So, I always always do not go to the appearance tab unless you want to adjust the font size, which is quite okay. Over the font, but please do not force people to take a look at your colors. And that on the form. Nice idea, but if someone is colorblind or using their own colors because they can see them better, you have in effect created a barrier. So we've added all of the form controls, and now we've added the links to the document. And we can tag the document.

Once the document is tacked with any document I have to tag using Acrobat. The first and was mentioned the document has language because I know will show up in a full check. The next thing I do is go and make sure that tab order is inferred from the document because I know that will crop up in a full check and then I take a look at the tax treaty covers sometimes what will happen depending on how the document is laid out, you will get chunks off, and usually this only requires some modest moving around of content to make sure that the logical order of the document is correct. And you notice that you do have a field tag, sorry a form tag, and for every form control there should be a form tag that may be one of the repairs that you need to do is to actually just create another form tag and move things around. In tab order, control people open the properties dialog, you go to the advance tab and then down to language, I recommend that if you're using he was sure French that you just choose English or French. You don't get fancy you choose English US, English UK, English Australia English Singapore French, French Canadian whatever. Because what happens is if I, which I do, I use the British synthesizer and British voice for my screen reader. If someone makes the document English US, then as soon as I open the document. Things are going to be pronounced in a way that I do not readily understand because they're going to be pronounced using American pronunciation instead of British pronunciation and it takes a while for you to adjust your hearing to the different pronunciations. Whereas if you just say English whether I'm using sorry, American English or British English, or Australian English it's going to use my synthesizer to regarding English. The tab order, I find that in Acrobat 11. It's a lot more intuitive, but I come in here and to double check any way to make sure that it's going to inferred the tab order from the document. As I say with Acrobat 11. I haven't actually had to do that but I come in and check anyway because I know these are two things that will always show up in an accessibility. If I do not do them.

Required fields that I have already covered. Some people are now just putting an Asterix in the toolkit. For example, I hear the grass is green star because my screen reader doesn't say Asterix or required field or anything like that. Again, that's why I prefer if it is a required field. It says the grass is green dash required then there's absolutely no doubt. And there's nothing worse than filling out a form, getting to the end and trying to submit it only to get an error message that there were four required fields but I somehow missed. And if I have my screenwriter reading quickly. I may not be able to hear and it may sound absolutely illogical to whatever it is I'm answering. So just as a technique used the full dash required.

Let's go quickly because all of my clocks are bonding and for any of you who've been on my webinars on past it you will know that on the hour. I have four or five clocks that fortunately lifecycle designer is going to take up a lot of time. I will give you the basics of it and stress that if you are creating a form in lifecycle designer, start from scratch. It is relatively easy once you've done all of them and work through the headaches. It's like PDF. It is like PDF, you have every time you open one. It's like a whole new ballgame, lifecycle designer once you get that hang of creating forms. It's like designing your Word documents, except you have, you are using the mouse, and this is a mouse driven activity. When you open or launch lifecycle designer. You can choose to open an existing form, create a new blank form or create a form from template and there are templates that are available to you, it's going to ask them if what you want to use for your template, if you are creating a blank, a form from scratch and I just choose, I want blank, and then it's going to ask you about page size and things like that. So it is something that you just go through to identify whether you are working with legal size or letter size and then you end up with the lifecycle user interface, so that top of your final menu, you have some toolbars along the right you have your list of form controls. You can add, you also have. I know I've taken a lot of the stuff out of here because I just want at the beginning of my document I want the list of form controls. As soon as I start adding form fields or form controls to my document I have other things, such as the accessibility features and the object information but I don't have the how-to and all of those other things, that kind of get in my way.

I do have a larger image of that list of form controls over on the right-hand side of the slide. On the larger picture you will notice I have a blank canvas and it is in a great, it is good, and you do have rulers, so you can put things precisely on the page, which helps when you are designing a form you can also put headings into your form and this would be how you do it, there are text fields or text controls and then there are simply text controls. You can write and copy and paste if you have information in a word document, any instructions, so you would create a text areas, you would identify, put the text in a specific size, and unfortunately, in lifecycle designer 10, there were no real styles, so I had to create headings using direct formatting. But I can identify it as a heading in the text properties, so I would put the heading in for the form. I would create another text box and I would copy and paste or type in the spell check is not as good as words I would tend to put it in word and copy and paste into here any instructions. So once I've put the text in and formatted it, the image on the right shows you a close-up of the properties for the text. And I've identified it as a heading one. It is a drop-down list and you can choose from paragraph headings, heading one, heading two, heading three and so forth. Again, here I have the segments on my form. I can position them where I want.

In this image. I've also added a question and three radio buttons. I can design the form exactly the way that I want it, and when I save this as a static PDF. The tags, the things that I do in the properties dialog in lifecycle designer going to become part of the tag structure for that form. So, lifecycle designer checkboxes when you add a checkbox. There are two parts of it. There's the actual checkbox which usually appears on the left and the text next to it which simply says checkbox. You can choose that input. Yes, no, agree, whenever you can put the question, I can put the grass is green or the sky is blue, so I would replace the text that says checkbox and then I would go over to the right into the list of form controls and just under the list of going to see the properties for the checkbox. Notice under accessibility, I have tooltip and then I have custom screen reader text.

If a screen reader does not find a tooltip. It will go to the custom screen reader text. But, if someone is using text to speech it depends on the tooltip. So unless it is something really special that I only one screen reader people to know about this form control. I put everything in the tooltip because I want everybody knows using either screen reading or text to speech to have access to the tooltip for filling out this particular form control. I find that putting the custom screen reader tip in is just redundant information. I can do it if I want but I tend to just put the information in the tool tip and you need to do this for all of the form controls that you created, so you need to go into accessibility and make sure there is a tooltip for them. As I said, you don't have to do the custom screen reader, but if you want, you can. You can also use tables for design, layout sometimes you will get error messages and this is an example of an error message in lifecycle designer. Fortunately again this is very visual.

You can go to that place in your form where there is a problem and find out exactly what the problem is, but it does allow you to use as you can see from the bottom two pictures on the site. It does allow you to use tables for design layout and not show the gridlines or not depending on what you want to do and how you are designing your form. Radio buttons are done in sets. And if you wanted to see. Just as in Adobe Acrobat in the lower right forms: Acrobat, we had a list of page 1, page 2 and the form controls on that. In lifecycle designer. The information can be found on the left-hand side of the document. And it will go through, you see page 1 and a list of the form controls on page 1. In the list in which they were going to be access. You can also turn on the tab order in, sorry, this is a drop-down list created it not same way that you would in Acrobat except again. The end result. The bottom image on the screen is going to be the same on the screen. You can see the tops of the letters of the next item on the list, but exactly the same principles. You create a list of several items and you choose a default item for the drop-down list. When you are creating a text form control. You have the same options that you have in Acrobat. As big as in blue in the image on the right hand side of the slide, that is the default color for form fields or form controls on your document.

So, you can make your text control as big as you want, as wide as you want, you can make it resemble paper depending on how much information you have. By default, when you had a text form control, the text for saying what it is about is on the left is on the right. Anytime you add a form control. There are these two parts. There is a text that identify a label for it and the actual form control itself.

If we want to look at the tab order. There is a way to turn on the tab order unlike Acrobat where you have the numbers that I find a little bit clearer to read in the upper left corner of the actual form. Now we have kind of the sheet yellow circles at the end of each form control that have a number on them and these two images show the form controls on this lifecycle designer form that I did that show you the tab order and again if the tab order is not correct. You can move them around change the tab order so that when you do save this as a static PDF document. You're going to tab through everything in the right order. So what you want to do when you have finished the lifecycle designer form is do save as and choose static PDF. And when you open it in Acrobat, you will be able to see the tabs, but not be able to edit them effectively or be able to do and accessibility full check. If you see any problems but that tax treated you need to go back to lifecycle designer and fix them there because again it is only using Adobe Acrobat. As the viewer for the XFA form.

If you have any other questions you can contact me. The e-mail address is info@karlincommunications.com. I do have a website. I'm also very pleased to announce a partnership between Karlin communications and accessible IT which is a company located here in Toronto that can handle your masses PDF accessibility needs. If you have a large number of PDF documents that need to be accessible. Please contact accessible IT, there website is listed here accessible.com, and ask for items, Spencer and mention my name. But those of you who have known me through the years know that I do not very often support or partner with other companies and this has been a long time coming, but they really do a good job on that accessible PDF. I was talking to Adam and I said his PDF for equal to mine and (inaudible) Adam, his company came up with some very creative ideas that actually rendered the content more accessible than I would have thought to do. So please take a look at accessibility IT and contact Adam if you have any large-scale PDF accessibility needs. So that's it for me. That is PDF forms and although a brief overview. I hope that it's at least given you some ideas and tips for working with PDF forms, so are there any questions?

  Karen, Susan (inaudible) wanted to know if there is a character limit to the question input in the tooltip?

  I haven't found one but you need to remember that if you are putting it in for every form control. That's a radio button or text box that someone's going to have to read it. That's why I say if it's a really long question plot the relevant parts of the question. To put in the tooltip so that it is not too long. The other problem is if you put an entire essay in the tooltip. It may affect the buffers and the readability of the information of the information by the adaptive technology.

  Also, Brandon said. When you have a chance could you review which fields of the dialogue property boxes are read by screen readers. For example, tooltip, name, etc.

  The tooltips are red, then name is not. So the tooltip is going to be read by the screen reader. If you're working with text boxes and drop-down list and information in the options tab is going to be read by the screen readers. So for example if you have the text boxes, the question number one, which would be the tooltip with, would be choose options that apply and the value would be the grass is green. The second box would be choose all options that apply and the sky is blue, that would be to information that is read to me by the screen reader. Otherwise I would just have something that is checkbox unchecked the sky is green checkbox unchecked, the sky is blue for go through my list of form controls, which are normally do. I just get my form. For example, if there were additional instructions for the form. Yes that was one of the reasons I talked about the excessive forms. Once you tap the document and Acrobat, once you tap the document in Acrobat. After you put the form controls in, any instructions you have for the former going to be tagged. If you are working with XFA forms in lifecycle designer as long as you create the text in lifecycle designer is going to be read choose to bring in a PDF document or a word document, then the documents are going to be seen as artifacts in the background and while the form controls may be accessible. You will not have access to the text, so in lifecycle designer you want to make sure that all of the content on your form from scratch and in Acrobat you want to make sure that after you had the form controls you remember to tag the document.

  I think that's all I've got for questions.

  Okay, Karen. I want to thank you for another thorough and very useful presentation. A week from today. Dan from freedom scientific will be talking about forms in Word and I should have the archive, available probably later tonight or early tomorrow. And if you were on my mailing list, you will get an announcement for us. Otherwise, you can look for it at HTTP://EASI.cc/archive/accessible–forms2013/resources.htm but I will send it to you in an e-mail. Thank you very much, see you all next week.

  Just before you go. I'm going to repost the Adobe upgrade to lifecycle designer for those of you who want. Thanks everybody. Remember, if you have any questions, just e-mail me and I look forward to meeting with you again in an EASI webinar.